The ability of humans to recognize a nearly unlimited number of unique visual objects must be based on a robust and efficient learning mechanism that extracts complex visual features from the environment. To determine whether statistically optimal representations of scenes are formed during early development, we used a habituation paradigm with 9-month-old infants and found that, by mere observ...

Visual estimation of numerosity involves the discrimination of magnitude between two distributions or perceptual sets that vary in number of elements. How performance on such estimation depends on peripheral sensory stimulation is unclear, even in typically developing adults. Here, we varied the central and surround contrast of stimuli that comprised a visual estimation task in order to determi...

The visual system must learn to infer the presence of objects and features in the world from the images it encounters, and as such it must, either implicitly or explicitly, model the way these elements interact to create the image. Do the response properties of cells in the mammalian visual system reflect this constraint? To address this question, we constructed a probabilistic model in which t...

One of the most debated questions in visual attention research is what factors affect the deployment of attention in the visual scene? Segmentation processes are influential factors, providing candidate objects for further attentional selection, and the relevant literature has concentrated on how figure-ground segmentation mechanisms influence visual attention. However, another crucial process,...

How can a visual system or cognitive system use the changing relationships between moving visual elements to decide which elements belong together as groups (or objects)? We have constructed a neural circuit model that selects object groupings based on global Gestalt common-fate evidence and uses information about the behavior of each group to predict the behavior of elements of the group. A si...

The associative sequence learning (ASL) model states that error patterns in observed actions during physical imitation and verbal description are identical, because of the critical role played by the process of visual input compared to the process after visual input. Action models were presented that comprised four elements: using right or left hand, using right or left stick, tapping right or ...

In this work we present an approach for video content representation based on the detection of recurring visual elements or regions. We hypothesize that such elements play a potentially central role in the underlying video sequence. The approach makes use of fundamental intrinsic properties of a video and, thus, it does not make any assumptions about the video content itself. Furthermore, our a...